2) #PersonalReferent: My dear father Sidney Cohen, whom I was with as he declined starting with MCI and then dementia. I saw how the ruminative loop would continue to decrease in time until he could ask the same question once every minute if he was agitated.

3) Once all alternatives on this point have been considered, compare costs and benefits, keeping in mind that kludging social frameworks, rituals and guidelines can minimize or alter technical requirements technical requirements.

4) You have drawn a Qat. #PersonalReferent: B. Kliban.

Your Spare Room

#PersonalReferent: I've often dreamed that I'm in one of my old places, that it's getting towards the end of first-year law school. It's somewhere an idealized version of the Vancouver I spent my 90s in, simplified and symbolic and arranged for my convenience.

#lifedesign #thoughts

5) This is our entropy. "Time is the fire in which we burn." And decay. It's the nature of organic life and aging (for now): Our systems decay.

#PersonalReferent BTTF 1985/1955/2015/1955B (specifically, backtothefuture.fandom.com/wiki/Lyon_Es... @michaeljfox1944.bsky.social

4) We Need More From Our Tools: The Implicit Trap

#PersonalReferent: Monster movies where a vine slithers around a character's ankle.

I think we lost focus and hoped for the goodness of human nature. Humans are good, but the design and pathways and drivers are all very fragile.

#WeNeedNewTools

You may have noticed me dropping in weird hashtags like #PersonalReferent: obvious in meaning but not purpose.

One theme I'm going to come back to again and again is that our tools are not meeting the needs of enough humans.

#fiction

The purpose of Western-structured fiction is to give us a sandbox for examining our assumed, actual, contradictory and absent value substrates, and defensively evaluating alternatives.

#PersonalReferent: Asimov, Bicentennial Man fix-up: "I am a canvas on which I intend to draw." "A man?"

#lifedesign

Show them it's possible. Give them that space to hope and dream. Even if the flaws can't be solved now, they may someday.

In the meantime we might be able to kludge the technical and sociopolitical gaps.

#PersonalReferent: Brainstorm (1983), criminally-underrated movie - more TBA.

2) I imagine other drives and motivators are too, especially the ones enshittifiers use. #Personalreferent principles of game design, especially cozy game design.

We play cozy games because we'd like to live in a world run along the rules of cozy games.

8) #PersonalReferent 1990s EfNet IRC #bearcave and how it maintained and built a defensive community against bad actors.

IRC story and generalized lessons TBD.

#systems #design #systemsthinking #organizationalstructure #oldmanyellsatdesignclouds #wecandobetter #firstoneinturnonthelights

6) #PersonalReferent: Holodeck arch, present in every iteration from ST:TAS to today (original name: control panel)

This 'meta layer' is very helpful to be able to dip in and out at will. More about that later.

5) The key word here is 'on.' Not "Do you want me to bring up the projections on my We-Woulda-Made?" The implication is that the device was used for that purpose, and is also for displaying it to others.

#PersonalReferent: scifiinterfaces.com/2013/10/02/t...

4) Tune up your own value landscape by finding the intersections and flaws. Try another one on to see what philosophies are really like.

#PersonalReferent: Swirly blood closeup in Pulp Fiction, segmented horse in The Cell, phenomenological glasses in The Diamond Age, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gyfq...

In an ideal world (existence of prisoners aside) we could trust that our efforts and trust are rewarded.

#personalreferent: TOS episode Alternative Factor, Kirk's wistful sign-off "But what of Lazarus? What of Lazarus?" or Turnabout Intruder's "She could have had a life as rich as any man (UGH)."